Santa Clara, Calif. — NEC Electronics America, Inc. will showcase its latest generation of universal serial bus (USB) technologies, along with other key technologies, at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
Daily demonstrations of NEC’s USB 3.0 host controller (part number uPD720200), claimed as the industry’s first USB-IF-certified USB 3.0 product, will feature a laptop computer with two USB 3.0 ports, with one port sending a video file at the “SuperSpeed” transfer rate to a USB 3.0 external storage device. To demonstrate the controller’s backward compatibility, the second port will send the same video file to a USB 2.0 external storage device for comparison.
Samples of customers’ motherboards and cards using the USB 3.0 device also will be on exhibit.
NEC Electronics claimed the industry’s first USB 3.0 host controller device in May 2009, and confirmed certification from the USB-IF, touted as another industry first, in September 2009. USB 3.0 prototype devices will support data transfer speeds up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0 transfer speeds, and will support backward compatibility in consumer electronic devices based on the current USB specification, says NEC.
NEC says designers can use the USB 3.0 system-on-chip (SoC) design solution to kick start the development of custom USB 3.0 products such as mass storage, display and video. The SOC design solution helps to reduce risk, improve efficiency and speed time to market, while allowing customers to focus on developing their own differentiated logic, according to the company.
The SOC design solution features NEC Electronics’ USB 3.0 intellectual property (IP) core, which is fully interoperable with the company’s USB 3.0 host controller and also backward compatible with the USB 2.0, 1.1 and 1.0 versions of the USB standard.
NEC expects rapid adoption of the platform as the need to transfer larger and larger amounts of information from PCs to external hard drives, portable electronic devices, and flash-based thumb drives, continues to grow.
A working demonstration of NEC’s USB 3.0, or SuperSpeed, capabilities will be showcased in the USB TechZone, at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) South Hall 3, booth #30769. NEC will also demo other technologies including its mixed-signal and power management ICs, intelligent buffer IC technology and EMMA series. Click here for more information about NEC’s activities at the show, and here to request a private demo and meeting at CES.